It’s been some time, but it looks like the BC are actually going to ask the right questions about safety culture in the design, construction and maintenance of complex buildings. I’ll give this one a watch.
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Blame mongering and fingerpointing inquiry surprised that Companies involved are claiming memory lapses when giving evidence.
It makes a good point though. Ultimate responsibility should not rest with the fire service.
But it is cheaper than making the necessary structural changes to safe management of complex buildings.
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But it does. The Fire Brigade are obliged to review/approve the fire escape strategy for any multi-tenanted building, such as Grenfell.
Is it fair to conclude that the fire service would assume that modifications to this building would have complied with whatever the current building standards were or are they expected to fund their own independent tests of cladding systems to see whether they are safe?
The advice about staying inside the flats would probably have been ok had the building not been modified.
Building standards are part of Building Regs, so the Local Authority (or private building control company approved/licenced by the Local Authority) would decide if the cladding was compliant. So, yes the Fire Brigade would assume the Building Regs were being complied with.
That is different from the fire escape strategy though. It is up to the Fire Brigade to make inspections to ensure the escape routes are not blocked, integrity of fire compartmentalisation is not compromised etc.
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One of the main issues appears to have been the delay caused by an older policy of requiring residents to stay put. No doubt that policy would have been changed had there been any suspicion that the building had been coated in flammable material. That said it ought to have been evident to officers arriving at the scene that something had gone badly wrong and that people needed to be got out immediately.
Yes, but I would question the “stay put” policy - given that the building was designed using a fire-proof compartments strategy with protected escape routes, the fire, which presumably spread from the cladding to the interior of the flats via the external windows (it is unlikely the windows would be fire-rated) it should not have spread from one flat to another or to the escape stairs.
The fact that the Fire Brigade specified a “stay put” policy implies that they knew the escape routes were compromised and not properly protected from the flats’ interiors by compliant fire doors and smoke seals.
Those flats were designed to contain fires so the policy of staying put should have worked.
Nobody expected (or in the case of KCC, cared) that the contractors would use flammable materials and the outside of the building would go up like a box of matches.
They should be going after KCC who didn’t check anything and allowed work to be done on the cheap with no governance.
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I agree but the Fire Brigade should also have been chasing KCC to have the fire escape routes upgraded - ie proper fire rated front doors on the flats with smoke seals, so that a normal escape strategy via the stair case could have been implemented.
I really do not get how allowing non compliant building changes to be made becomes the fire brigades fault. The contractors and building regs inspectorate should be in line for a kicking well before the fire brigade are made to carry the blame. In my industry if a fabrication is non compliant all the fault lays with the fabricator or designer, and is corrected at their cost. Using non compliant materials would mean starting again from scratch.
We’ll doubtless hear that the materials used were compliant in specific implementations so it won’t be the manufacturers that carry the can. It ought to be whoever decided to implement the wrong materials although they’ll doubtless claim they were working to a budget set by the council and that their proposals were given the nod. The council will argue they were following the recommendations of experts so they can’t be held responsible. In all likelihood no one will take the blame.
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Was there any written assurance trail ? You’ll know better than I do Jim that ‘Assume makes an Ass of U and me’. If you need to know whether or not the cladding is compliant then you should be duty bound to ask, and the building’s owners/managers should be duty bound to reply and to accept responsibility if that reply is incorrect. If they don’t know whether the contractors have complied then they in turn should have asked them, again requiring a written response. Sooner or later along that chain someone would have told an untruth. The manslaughter law could then have come down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks.
VB
Yes, there must have been. It would probably have been managed by a PM company employed by the Local Authority who would have tendered it to several contractors, and the winner probably selected by the local Authority (maybe by recommendation of the PM) It might have been designed by an architect appointed by the local authority directly, or if procured under a Design & Build contract, the contractor. Either way, an independent Health & Safety Planning Supervisor would also have been employed to ensure compliance with building and fire regs.
It’s a shame that those who own the building are not held responsible. It is too easy to blame regs and standards, which themselves will only be as good as the last major accident. The fire brigade should not be responsible for producing the fire evacuation plan, testing it perhaps, owning it, no. How civil engineering had ended up a generation or two behind safety management in other engineering endeavours is beyond me.
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KCC own the building but it was managed by KCTMO until they realised they wouldn’t make huge profits by actually delivering the service and adhering to safety regs so they threw it back over the fence to the council after the fire.
I’d be interested to know how many KCC councillors or people close to them were directors or involved in KCTMO
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And I rather suspect that the council understood none of the risks and relied entirely on regs and standards.
The will be another fire or incident that costs multiple lives within five years and fuck all will change. Cities and universities have been throwing up cheap high rise blocks for a decade now, over a thousand of them, it’s only a matter of time.
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Quite a good piece
Another one in Manchester, student accommodation block goes up like a Roman candle. No deaths thank fuck, will probably be ignored as a result.